eLCC- Day 1

This week, I’m at the eLearning Consortium of Colorado (eLCC) conference in Breckenridge. After sitting through a day’s group of sessions, I thought I’d give you a few quick thoughts on topics brought up here.

“Convincing Faculty”

We had a session where we broke into groups. One of the topics was how to convince faculty what needs to be done in an online course. This struck me, and the three PPCC faculty members at our table as a very wrong way of thinking. I can’t speak for all elements of the college, but in eLearning, we work very hard to come along side the faculty and help them better teach our students. Sometimes faculty change my way of thinking and sometimes it’s the other way around. Either way, it’s not about convincing, but focusing on the success of our students.

Sometimes It’s Better to Start Fresh

Wyoming is moving all of their courses to Canvas. Notice I didn’t say a school… the whole state, K-20, is moving. Sounds like a huge undertaking with many pitfalls. Then, I heard Laramie County Community College isn’t going to migrate courses from D2L to Canvas, but rather ask their instructors to start fresh and re-build their courses in the new system. It’s a huge project, but it’s also getting them to re-examine all of their courses from the ground up. This re-examination that all of us should consider doing from time to time in our classes, even if we aren’t changing platforms.

Video Captions

There was some confusion about what’s required to caption a video at PPCC. If you want to create a video and caption it yourself, you are welcome to do that. The other option is to bring in eLearning and have us use some REV resources to have it captioned for you. Both are very valid and can be mixed. From where I sit, as long as the captions are present and accurate (auto-captions need to be reviewed and edited before publishing), it doesn’t matter where the captions came from.